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From the Editor: Questions and Controversies
Lawrence Hanley
As the title on the cover indicates, this issue is chock-full of provocations. But the controversies explored by our contributors are not of the cheap, easy, or "hot button" variety. Instead, they focus on linchpins of our profession, places where the values and ideals of the academic profession appear strained by forces internal and external. From my point of view, the articles in this issue work best when they expose pressures—frequently not obvious or acknowledged—on our sense of professional identity and, consequently, challenge us to rethink our often too stable sense of how the academic profession works or should work.
The academic profession is, of course, continually responding to historical change, both the explicit kind associated with newspaper headlines and the more subterranean kind that happens in the absence of scribes or photographers. Sometimes, as Paul Lauter argues in his essay, the academic profession responds too quickly and simply to changes in the surrounding social and political environment. Lauter tallies the destructive similarities between academic and corporate values that marked the 1990s and points to the forces that may shape a "post-Enron" future for the academy. Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden are interested in an equally profound historical shift within the academy, namely the increasing presence of women on the faculty and staff. As Mason and Goulden demonstrate, our professional bildungsroman, our collective narrative of professional development and fulfillment, has yet to catch up with this fundamental change. Likewise, in his essay, John Jeffries Martin argues that the status distinctions we've inherited from an older version of the university (where faculty were paid even less than they are now) will no longer suffice in today's more complex, fragmented, and often confused higher educational system. Although they may appear Jacobins, these contributors aim to fortify and consolidate the academic profession under new conditions.
Recently, one of the many publications devoted to sorting and ranking colleges and universities named a campus in my home multiversity as the "most beautiful in the nation." An advertising campaign centered on pulchritude soon followed. It's probably nice to be pretty, but does this distinction have anything to do with academic value? Shannon Hodges doesn't think so. In his article, Hodges explains how administrators and others crave the publicity of college rankings. At the same time, however, these rankings work to obscure both the political economy of higher education and the real work accomplished by faculty and institutions.
Some elements of our profession seem to remain constant, however, despite beauty contests and bear markets: the ideals of academic freedom and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge; and the alienation of governance and administration, for instance. In this issue, each of these pillars is subjected to new scrutiny. In his fascinating essay, Gary Jay Williams describes how, rather than simplifying things, the ideal of academic freedom may multiply dilemmas and complexities. Robert Hauptman paints a disheartening picture of the unethical pursuit of academic knowledge. Peter Facione offers a brilliant proposal for harnessing academic expertise to institutional budgeting, thus ameliorating the perennial tensions between academic planners and academic practitioners. Each of these authors, like the rest of the issue's contributors, implicitly or explicitly challenges us to revise our professional common sense. After all, self-criticism too is an academic ideal.
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